Something has been nagging me in the back of my mind. Where – this side of sanity – would you expect to hear the question: 'What is government if words have no meaning?'
It’s the question Jared Loughner posed to Gabrielle Giffords at a meeting in 2007. Then I read this at Small Dead Animals … it was an “aha” moment. Of course; the faculty lounge in the English (or "Fill in the Blank Studies”) Department of any university.
Jared Lee Loughner, appears to be insane. But if we are going there, let's go the full distance: He appears to be an atheist Nietzschean enthusiast for the Communist Manifesto whose obsession with language resembles the PC fixation on "privileged discourse." So let's try to stick to the facts.
What about another Loughner quote:
[I’m]…talking about the kind of existentialist chaos that exists in our own lives and our inability to overcome the sense of alienation and frustration we experience when we try to create bonds of intimacy and solidarity with one another…
I kid, I kid.
That’s a quote from Cornel West that I found at the top of a Google search of famous quotes by West.
Here is John Derbyshire on West's book Race Matters:
... it was just so badly written and constructed that you couldn't tell what it was trying to say. You could have scissored that book up into its constituent words, rearranged them in random order, printed the result as another book, and not been able to tell the difference.
I am totally confident that if you provided the Loughner question to any modern English professor and told him or her that the quote was by West (I'm not picking on West, he's the first verbose whackjob that came to mind), they would give you an interpretation that is anything other than the meaningless mental meanderings of a nut. In that respect, the modern academy is much like the emperor in the fable with the wonderful new clothes, they will see something if it validates their ego.
It's another thing they can't stand about Sarah Palin; she calls BS where she finds it.
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